I heard rumors that that might happen. We just picked up a nice little 50" Panasonic ST60 Plasma for the living room (lots of off-angle). Nice display once the break in time was behind us. That said, I have no complaints with our 55" Samsung LN55a950. I know many of them had problems. But ours still looks great in the media room nearly five years and counting.

I installed a TC-P50ST60 like yours and it looked good before setup & break-in and it was downright impressive once those were done. The black level & detail in 007's tux and shirt in the restaurant scene from Skyfall was amazing.

Panasonic lost almost $1B last year and, thanks to retailers like Best Buy setting their LCD/LED TVs to "torch mode" and decreasing the brightness of the plasma TVs, the number of plasma TVs sold decreased drastically. They weren't making more than a few points on the plasma TVs, if even that, so I doubt they make much more on LCD/LED TVs (I check their prices often and my Panasonic distributor is a national distributor for them, so they have a good idea of BB's cost).